Good morning, brain.
No, Viola did not gain the ability to change her sex at will when she was almost lost in the shipwreck off the coast of Illyria, because drowning is fucking the sea and all Poseidon's lovers are like that. I do not care that this argument was presented through lovely, classical, Greenaway-like cinematography, the sunlight playing harpsichord over a depth of pearl-green water and a very traditional Neptune among its motes: muscular, naked in pearl-strands and a billowing chlamys of kelp, his sea-streaming hair and beard as darkly glossed as wet mussel, trident in his left hand and conch in his right. Viola sinks in women's clothes into his arms, her face curved like a sleeper's into the hoplite-bronze ripples of her hair, then within its weed-drifts she twists and comes alive and the body revealed as stays, skirts, panels and ribbons fall away is a youth's, slender and hard-planed, as cleanly proportioned as a kouros, her skin as solid as stone in the undersea light. Their hair weaves together in the currents, their bodies dappling over one another like shoaling fish or seals; she wades out of the surf in the salt-heavy rags of her dress, her hair as tangled as rockweed, her girl's breasts bare until the sailors see her from their driftwood fires, running up the beach in sandy splashes at the dusk-margin of sea and land, relieved not to have to give up both twins for lost. And all the brothers too: and yet I know not. It is not textually supported and directors of Twelfth Night will look funny at you. Also there is no reason it should not have occurred with Sebastian, too, and that would be a very different story. (Though he was saved by human intervention, so perhaps that interfered. Seafaring Antonio is a loser in love, not successful at disguising. A skilled sea-captain—he has his god's favor, but not his graces.) No one I knew was playing any of the characters, not even actors from Prospero's Books (1991). They all had the right faces for the time, although it was not clear if that time was the seventeenth century, the sixteenth, or the fourth BCE.
Now if you could be this eloquent when you're awake, it would be useful. I am so very tired, and so tired of it.
No, Viola did not gain the ability to change her sex at will when she was almost lost in the shipwreck off the coast of Illyria, because drowning is fucking the sea and all Poseidon's lovers are like that. I do not care that this argument was presented through lovely, classical, Greenaway-like cinematography, the sunlight playing harpsichord over a depth of pearl-green water and a very traditional Neptune among its motes: muscular, naked in pearl-strands and a billowing chlamys of kelp, his sea-streaming hair and beard as darkly glossed as wet mussel, trident in his left hand and conch in his right. Viola sinks in women's clothes into his arms, her face curved like a sleeper's into the hoplite-bronze ripples of her hair, then within its weed-drifts she twists and comes alive and the body revealed as stays, skirts, panels and ribbons fall away is a youth's, slender and hard-planed, as cleanly proportioned as a kouros, her skin as solid as stone in the undersea light. Their hair weaves together in the currents, their bodies dappling over one another like shoaling fish or seals; she wades out of the surf in the salt-heavy rags of her dress, her hair as tangled as rockweed, her girl's breasts bare until the sailors see her from their driftwood fires, running up the beach in sandy splashes at the dusk-margin of sea and land, relieved not to have to give up both twins for lost. And all the brothers too: and yet I know not. It is not textually supported and directors of Twelfth Night will look funny at you. Also there is no reason it should not have occurred with Sebastian, too, and that would be a very different story. (Though he was saved by human intervention, so perhaps that interfered. Seafaring Antonio is a loser in love, not successful at disguising. A skilled sea-captain—he has his god's favor, but not his graces.) No one I knew was playing any of the characters, not even actors from Prospero's Books (1991). They all had the right faces for the time, although it was not clear if that time was the seventeenth century, the sixteenth, or the fourth BCE.
Now if you could be this eloquent when you're awake, it would be useful. I am so very tired, and so tired of it.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}